The Suicidal State - Madoka Kishi

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Résumé :
Through mapping the entwinement between the turn-of-the-century nativist discourse, race suicide, and the frequent representation of suicide in Progressive-Era literature, The Suicidal State asks what kind of agency, subjectivity, and intimacies suicide could forge in its undoing of the selfhood. Prefiguring the twenty-first-century white nationalist discourse replacement theory, race suicide imagined the white race's declining birthrate as a sign of its imminent extinction, sparking anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation. Suicidal figures in period literature, this book argues, symptomatically enact race suicide to short-circuit the imperatives of racial reproduction and self-preservation, instead gesturing toward new erotic relationalities and pleasures....

Sommaire:
Madoka Kishi is a Professional in Residence in English at Louisiana State University. She has translated Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling (Takanashi-shobo, 2022) and co-translated Judith Butler's Parting Ways (Seido-sha, 2019) into Japanese. She has published essays in the Journal of American Studies, The Henry James Review, and the Journal of Modern Literature and is currently co-translating Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism for Kadensha (forthcoming, 2024).

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